The Wall was originally built to keep people out. Seventeenth-century Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam, fearful of attacks by natives, the rival colonists of New England and bears, erected the wooden stockade from the Hudson to the East river. It was also intended to keep the settlers' livestock, including bulls, in.

The English, when they had taken over Stuyvesant's little republic, built the street, but the name stuck and so did the psychology - a defensive, self-contained community, worried about bears but jealous of its bulls.

Steve Fraser's eclectic book is the story of how this little patch of Manhattan became the centre of the financial universe and of how the huge power it came to wield gave it a centrality in American sociocultural life. In the last century, it became one of the devices by which the United States exercised global supremacy.

'Culture' has not always been the street's defining characteristic. In the 19th century, it was the home of 'over-civilised barbarism,' says Steve, 'a boulevard of ravenous appetite ... while the nation suffered depression, the "morganisers" [more of their namesake later] who'd looted the Treasury under the guise of rescuing it, spent their ill-gotten gains on yacht races, pyrotechnics and balls.'

One man more than any other made the street the focus of American life. John Pierrepoint Morgan brought together all the strands of financial power into the House of Morgan at the turn of the last century, got the federal government out of an impending crisis and staved off nationwide depression for 30 years at least. He also began the trend by which financiers became the patrons of 'high culture', giving birth to the museums, art collections, orchestras and operas with which Mammon still salves its conscience.

High art was always a minority interest, however, and late in the 20th century it returned to its earlier, more hedonistic roots In Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe and in the character of Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone's 1987 film, the world's image of the street was fixed - 'young white men baying for money', in Wolfe's immortal phrase.

By September 2001, the Street of Dreams had already had its share of nightmares. The attacks on the Twin Towers (not strictly speaking on the Street, but still symbolising its brash extravagance) were regarded as an assault on the heart of the Great Satan by the jihadists and on the American way of life by everybody else.

According to some, 9/11 meant the end of Wall Street, at least as the discrete locus of financial power in America. It was too vulnerable, too expensive and, in the age of the internet and off-shore-based hedge-funds, increasingly unnecessary. It may live on purely as the biggest brass plaque in the world, but the Street will always be there, as Steve says: 'One market under God.'